Najam in NYT: Modi Comes to Pakistan
Dean Adil Najam of the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University is happy that Indian Prime Minister Narendera Modi made an unannounced visit to Lahore to call on Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, but unlike others he is hesitant to call this a ‘historic’ event. The visit, although very brief and unannounced was the first by an Indian Prime Minister to Pakistan in a decade.
The Pardee School Dean expressed these views speaking to The New York Times (December 25, 2016) soon after the unexpected meeting. The newspaper quotes him as follows:
Adil Najam, the dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, said in an interview that there was a danger of overanalyzing the visit.
“I think it’s actually a good step. But that is what it is: a step, a very small step. There is a danger of reading too much into that,” Mr. Najam said, adding that false expectations eventually “become a recipe for future heartbreak.”
Dean Najam elaborated on these views in a later television interview given to AlJazeera TV (25 December, 2015). He pointed out that while he was happy that the visit happened and while it was a welcome sign of the process moving forward, it was only one step. “Many more steps will have to be taken,” Najam said, “before we come anywhere close to ‘historic.’”
Interestingly, this meeting was triggered by a sequence of events that started with a brief side-meeting between Prime Ministers Nawaz Sharif (Pakistan) and Narendra Modi (India) in Paris, on the sidelines of the climate change negotiations, on November 30, 2015. Dean Adil Najam had accompanied the Pakistan Prime Minister at these meetings and was present during his meeting with the Indian Prime Minister.